Paris (AFP)

OVHcloud, the French group which is one of the European champions of the cloud (dematerialized computing), was the victim on Wednesday for more than an hour of a major failure reflected on many websites, while the group is in full swing Initial Public Offering.

The blackout temporarily affected many shopping, cultural and business sites, which became completely inaccessible at the start of the morning.

According to OVHcloud, the outage was caused by an intervention on a router in one of its data centers in the United States, at 9:12 am (French time).

The faulty equipment was "isolated" around 10:15 am, the company said.

According to the specialist site Downdetector, the peak of reports of the failure was reached around 9.45 a.m., before dropping rapidly.

Based in Roubaix (North), the company with more than 2,400 employees and 632 million euros in turnover is one of the stars of French tech.

It first established itself as a web host and then succeeded in building a European offer in a cloud market largely dominated by American giants such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

The outage comes at a very bad time for OVHcloud, which is offering its securities to investors as part of an IPO scheduled for Friday.

The Secretary of State for Digital, Cédric O, sent a message of support to OVHcloud on Twitter.

"Like what, this kind of bug does not happen only to small businesses like @Facebook ... #bravopourleretablissementrapide," he tweeted, referring to the several-hour outage suffered by Facebook last week, in because of network problems there too.

OVHcloud had already been the victim of a fire in March in a data center in Strasbourg, which had also caused major disruptions on many websites.

"Bad configuration of a router"

On Wednesday morning, many companies and individuals complained about the unavailability of their websites, or problems such as the inability to access their emails, or even their telephone line.

OVHcloud offered "its sincerest apologies" to its affected customers, and promised to "be as transparent as possible about the causes and consequences" of the incident.

The OVH AFP data center network

On Twitter, the founder and president of the group, Octave Klaba, explained that the outage was linked to a technical manipulation decided by OVHcloud following a recent increase in DDOS attacks (which aim to saturate the victim's servers in l 'burying under the requests).

"In recent days, the intensity of DDoS attacks has increased a lot. We have decided to increase our capacity to handle" these attacks "by adding new infrastructure" in an OVHcloud data center in the United States, " he indicated.

But "a bad router configuration caused the network to go down," he added.

OVHcloud wants to go public on Friday with an expected fundraising of 350 million euros, for a valuation of the company between 3.5 and 3.75 billion euros.

Octave Klaba and his family will remain largely in the majority after the operation.

Group executives predict a 25% sales growth rate by 2025, but have warned that there is no planned dividend distribution for future shareholders, the group wanting to focus above all on l investment, with 2 billion euros planned for the period 2020-2025.

Cloud providers make the enormous computing capacity of their data centers available to their customers, with an advantage in terms of cost and continuous adaptation to changing computing and storage power requirements.

The OVHcloud IPO should be the third this year for a large French tech company, after that of the musical nugget Believe in June and that in September of the cybersecurity product distribution company Exclusive Networks.

© 2021 AFP